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| A dragonfly studies me from the clothesline |
The conversation about Progress as a civil religion
continues at the Archdruid
Report.
In the spirit of his critique that Progress is falling,
I'll no longer refer to Progress as a grand narrative, civil religion, or
ideology. Instead I'll start calling it a "tradition." As in,
"traditions of progress are being increasingly called into question by
young people, who want more practical and up to date ways of dealing with the
world."
Or,
"steeped in the time-worn traditions of Progress,
nation-states were woefully unprepared to deal with a changing world."
There's something elegant about using a tradition’s own most insidious
insinuations against it.
This week, the Archdruid continued his lecture about the
difficulties of unwinding our traditions of Progress, making a target of
scientists, who are arguably some of its high priests and beneficiaries.
As the broken promises about jetpacks and flying cars become an iconic
refrain for an anxious population, he argues that big, institutional science is
liable to go down with its church.
This was my rejoinder:
A couple of years ago I was research director for a project
that looked into to how to build support for the arts as a public good. One of
the striking findings was that the old narrative of the arts as central to
“culture” (in its original sense of something that grows and progresses) had
vanished from the public consciousness almost without a trace (in the
Midwestern US in any case). This formerly widely held idea that arts could lead
to a kind of moral or other kind of “elevation” survived only among a small
stratum of the elite. For the rest, the arts might be interesting or
entertaining or a chance for people to show off a skill, but it wasn’t a public
matter and certainly not important to the “development” of your city or your
nation. In effect, “Progress”, had died out in this realm practically without
the public noticing.
In order to rebuild a sense of arts as a public good, we
found that talking about the “ripple effect” of arts in a community brought
people back on board. That is, art events – whether you cared to be there or
not – made your community a better place to live, knit people together and
enriched a shared conversation, and so on. It is a pivot that will warm an art
booster’s heart, but it no longer has anything to do with Progress.
My point with this tangent, is that I strongly suspect that
Progress is going to slip away from science as well, perhaps similarly
unremarked by the public at large. And to the extent it persists, science,
practical, useful science will be valued not as the heroic engine of Progress,
but as a practice, and a method, and a toolkit that can make that community and
that place that you value, better.
I’m a bad gardener, because I’m a bit too much of an
experimenter, and tend to value a lesson learned more than a full basket of
cucumbers -- but I’m sure if I had to buckle down I could use some science to
create some more constructive ripples in my gardening community.
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